New LORE – New FOLK = New Folklore
MUSIC IN THE INSTITUTE PROCESS
By Istvan Dely
Moonlit night in
a wide clearing in front of the Bahá’í Center in Kambalua,
in the jungles of Upper Suriname. Heini, the local Saamaka
tutor and myself sit in the heart of a tightly packed circle
of kids, junior youth, young mothers with suckling babes,
elderly women, young men and elderly men (in this order). The
two of us are tirelessly playing the traditional apinti and
apuku drums, and the multitude around us is singing at the top
of their voices: Haika, baa! Mbei du ma no mbe wöutu bisi yu.
(Say, O brethren! Let deeds, not words, be your adorning). The
kids started it half an hour ago. The drums and the singing
drew as a lodestone virtually the whole village into the
growing circle around us. More and more people learn the song
and join in. They keep on singing, ever more vigorously, and
wouldn’t let us, poor drummers, stop.
This “hit song”
was composed by a group of junior youth of a Study Circle
three villages downriver barely five days ago, a previous
stopover of our teaching trip among the Saamaka Bush Negroes
of the Upper Suriname. Two other villages since then already
learned it and added a composition each. The group in Kambalua
learned all three and added their own contribution, another
song in traditional music style, to Bahá’u’lláh’s
selected quotes in Ruhi Book 1 in their mother tongue. I and
my African drum served merely as catalysts in starting and
encouraging this process, recording on a cheap cassette
recorder the new repertory being created, so that other
communities could learn it. This process, simple as it looks,
is nothing short of CREATING NEW FOLKLORE.
Folklore, Shoghi
Effendi says, is the expression of a people. A people,
however, is not a static entity. By law it must change: decay
or grow. The Creative Word of God for today is the single most
potent agency to empower people to grow. The Institute Process
is at present the best channel for effecting individual and
collective transformation organized around a sequenced group
study of the Sacred Word. The Sacred Word can only release its
transforming power if it is planted in the very heart of the
culture of a people. “It is here, at the very heart of a
culture, that the process of the transformation of a people
begins (Letter dated 21 August 1994 from the International
Teaching Centre to all Continental Counsellors).” Hence the
importance and urgency, stressed time and again by the
Universal House of Justice and the International Teaching
Centre, of an integral, systematic and grass roots focused use
of the arts as an essential part of the Institute process.
Let me stress
again: it was not this lowly servant who performed such an
outburst of musical creativity among the Saamaka: it was their
own grass roots youth, participants of the Study Circles. I
only took the lid off the pressure cooker. The fire heating
the cooker was Bahá’u’lláh’s Words, teachings, and
love.
In some
communities you’ll find specially gifted individuals who
would spontaneously compose music to express their newly found
faith, knowledge and love of Bahá’u’lláh. But my
experience is that every group of youth, without expression,
can be successfully induced to make collective compositions to
the quotes you give them. Toward the end of a two-week
intensive training course on drumming and related arts for
tutors and participants of Study Circles at the Regional
Institute in Salvador, Brazil, I split up the twenty odd
participants into four groups, wrote Bahá’u’lláh’s
Hidden Word “O friend! In the garden of thy heart plant
naught but the rose of love…” on the board (in Portuguese,
of course), broken down as if it were a poem or lyrics for a
song, and gave them all the task to scatter in the spacious
green area surrounding the institute and collectively compose
music to these words, in any of the traditional, typical
Bahian music styles. Each group took along one or two! drums,
a pandero, an agogo or a birimbao to help shape the rhythm.
After about an hour and a half we all gathered together and
each group presented its composition to the rest: four very
different and equally beautiful compositions were born that
day, within their distinctive musical identity! I had just
walked around from group to group, encouraging them with eager
sympathy. That’s all a tutor has to do: to be a promoter:
“By being a promoter of the arts at the grass roots, a tutor
opens up ‘creative channels through which can flow
inspiration and the force of attraction to beauty.’ (Letter
dated 5 November 2001 from the International Teaching Centre
to all Continental Counsellors).”
By so doing, we
are not only enriching and deepening the collective learning
and transformation process which is at the core of Study
Circles, but also performing an urgent task of “cultural
ecology”. Shoghi Effendi says that “Music, as one of the
arts, is a natural cultural development...(Shoghi Effendi,
Directives from the Guardian, p. 49).” However, this natural
cultural development has been interrupted and all but effaced
by the omnipresent multinational media onslaught of our
consumer society: the music thus carried to the farthest
corners of the globe is not the expression of a people, any
people, any more, but manipulation from a giant industry which
tends to level to uniformity the rich cultural diversity we
Bahá’ís have a Divine mandate to preserve. To offset the
cultural erosion brought by globalization as practiced today,
a conscious, sustained effort, resting on principle, must be
brought to bear, and Bahá’ís, though not alone in this
enterprise, should be at th! e forefront of the battle for the
preservation of the diversity of cultural identities as
essential building blocks of a future global civilization as
envisaged by Bahá’u’lláh. That’s why “The House of
Justice supports the view that in every country the cultural
traditions of the people should be observed within the
Bahá'í community as long as they are not contrary to the
Teachings. (Letter of the Universal House of Justice dated 16
December 1998, regarding traditional practices in Africa).”
On the other
hand, the prevailing, world-engulfing “MTV culture” of our
times not only threatens cultural diversity, but spreads what
Shoghi Effendi called “the prostitution of the arts.” “Even
music, art, and literature, which are to represent and inspire
the noblest sentiments and highest aspirations and should be a
source of comfort and tranquillity for troubled souls, have
strayed from the straight path and are now the mirrors of the
soiled hearts of this confused, unprincipled, and disordered
age (Letter of the Universal House of Justice dated 10
February 1980 to the Iranian believers residing in various
countries throughout the world).” In the face of this trend
“…the House of Justice feels that one of the great
challenges facing Bahá'ís everywhere is that of restoring to
the peoples of the world an awareness of spiritual reality…One
of the distinctive virtues given emphasis in the Bahá'í
Writings is respect for that which is sacred…Bahá'ís
endowed with artistic talent are in a unique position to use
their abilities, when treating Bahá'í themes, in such a way
as to disclose to mankind evidence of the spiritual renewal
the Bahá'í Faith has brought to humanity through its
revitalization of the concept of reverence (Letter dated 24
September 1987 on behalf of the Universal House of Justice to
an individual. Compilations, ! The Importance of the Arts in
Promoting the Faith).”
So in our work
promoting the arts at the grass roots we should reach back to
those layers of the culture that are still untouched by modern
contamination. “At the most profound depth of every culture
lies veneration of the sacred. Efforts to advance the Faith in
rural areas, then, are most successful when the sacred in the
culture of the villagers is identified and they are assisted
in transferring their loyalty and allegiance to the Faith,
placing Bahá’u’lláh and His Covenant at that sanctified
core of their universe (Letter dated 21 August 1994 from the
International Teaching Centre to all Continental Counsellors).”
This “sanctified
center of their universe”, of course, is easier to identify
and plug into where traditional religions are still preserved
and practiced. Such is the case of the native American
religions and the African religions of the Americas (santería,
vodoun, winti, candomble). In these religions the medium of
“theology”, so to speak, are the arts, especially music,
dance and drama. Here, arts are not reduced to mere hedonistic
and trivial entertainment, but preserve their primary sacred,
spiritual and community building nature and function. This
fact makes the music and dance modes preserved in these deeply
religious cultures especially appropriate to be used as
preferential “raw material” in the institute process which
revolves around Bahá’u’lláh’s Words, instead of the
prevalent fashionable pop music styles. When brought into the
Faith, however, they undergo a process of selection,
adaptation and synthesis: that is, while preserving their
original association with th! e sacred, they grow and develop
into something much greater and more universal.
As a one time
tatan’ganga (high priest) in the Afro Cuban Congo religion,
I feel especially privileged and graced by Bahá’u’lláh’s
bounty that allowed me to help the friends in West Africa,
Haiti, Honduras, Suriname, French Guyana and Brazil free their
rightful African spiritual and cultural heritage from
centuries-old prejudice and discrimination on the part of the
dominant Western cultures and incorporate it into the Bahá’í
Faith through the Institute process. I was moved to tears when
I saw a representative of the National Spiritual Assembly of
Haiti state with pride in a television interview: “We are
Bahá’ís, but we are also Haitians, and Bahá’u’lláh
teaches us to preserve our cultural identity, and vodoun is
definitely part of Haitian cultural identity.” To say this
publicly in Haiti takes a lot of courage. This very friend, at
the time of my first teaching trip to Haiti, would vehemently
deny any association with, nay, even any knowledge of vodoun
and its rich treasur! e house of music, dance, drama and
visual arts. Let there be no misunderstanding: this change of
heart is not my merit. It’s all there in the Writings and
the spirit of our Faith. We only have to look, hearken and
heed.
There is, in my
experience, an additional benefit to this “cultural
ecological” approach in the promotion of the arts at the
grass roots in the institute process: it can offset and
counterbalance the apparent uniformity of the institute
courses that have been adopted in the entire Bahá’í world
and ensure that the Faith becomes culturally embedded into
every community and is not perceived as something foreign. The
International Teaching Center is aware of those concerns and
even reticence I myself have encountered in some quarters
regarding the Ruhi courses: “Gradually most national
communities around the world adopted for their basic sequence
of courses the Ruhi Institute curriculum, which had been
developed over many years specifically in response to
large-scale expansion. In light of the focus and energy being
devoted to furthering the institute process in every national
community, concerns were expressed by some believers about the
emphasis on training and the use of a u! niform curriculum. In
such a wide-scale enterprise of taking great numbers of
friends through a set curriculum, it is to be expected that
some individuals might not find the materials suited to their
learning style.” (from the document arranged by the
International Teaching Centre, Building Momentum: A Coherent
Approach to Growth)
I found that by
bringing in those cultural ingredients that a systematic use
of the community arts imply, into the ways we deliver these
courses, these fears and perceived obstacles can easily be
surmounted. Those Saamaka villagers from the Upper Suriname
who memorized the Ruhi book quotes by singing them in their
own music, certainly didn’t feel threatened by any undue
imposition from outside. They were creating their own new
folklore from the powerful new “lore” (knowledge, wisdom)
enshrined in the Teachings of Bahá’u’lláh, on their way,
from their own roots, to become a new “folk” (people),
part of the promised “new race of men.”
